Jacquelyn Martin/AP
It's
fortunate for Hillary Clinton that Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent
socialist from Vermont who is challenging her for the Democratic
presidential nomination, despises and eschews negative advertising.
That's because the political consulting firm that Sanders has retained
to advise his campaign has a well-developed expertise in devising attack
ads. Earlier this year, this outfit,
Devine Mulvey Longabaugh,
won
a Pollie award from the American Association of Political Consultants
for creating the best Democratic congressional ad of 2014. The
spot
slammed Dave Trott, a Republican running for a congressional seat in
Michigan, for making millions of dollars by foreclosing on residents of
his state, and it focused on the harrowing eviction of a 101-year-old
Detroit woman. Trott survived this assault and handily won the seat in
the Republican district, but the
Washington Post called the commercial "one of the most brutal attack ads you'll ever see."
The Sanders campaign has no plans to hurl these kinds of ads
at Clinton. As Tad Devine, the veteran political operative who leads
this firm and a longtime adviser to Sanders, notes, mudslinging is not
part of the campaign strategy that Sanders and his advisers have
crafted. There won't even be one speck of dust directly tossed at
Clinton. But, Devine tells me, implicit negative messages aimed at
Clinton will certainly be "embedded" in Sanders' advertising and social
media messaging.
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Sanders
does have an overall plan on how to beat Clinton. As Devine explains,
it goes something like this: Raise enough money to devote significant
resources to building a full operation and maintaining a media presence
in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as Nevada and
South Carolina. At the same time, develop a basic foundation for
campaign organizations in other states, so if Sanders fares well in the
initial contests, these preliminary outfits can quickly be built out.
Devine and other Sanders advisers estimate they will need to raise
$40-$50 million by the Iowa caucuses to be in such a position, and they
claim Sanders is on track to hit that mark, mainly with thousands and
thousands of low-dollar contributions. (Sanders has drawn
crowds of thousands
at recent campaign events.) "I don't know if we can outright beat her
in Iowa and New Hampshire," Devine says, "but we have a real shot at it
in both places."
Sanders has survived and thrived in politics by neutralizing negative ads and resisting the urge to attack.
And when—or if—that happens, Devine figures, Sanders will have about a
million contributors already on his side, and this group will
enthusiastically kick in more money to replenish Sanders' coffers and
fund the continuation of Bernie-mentum. "I worked for Walter Mondale in
1984," Devine recalls, "but I saw what Gary Hart did." Hart, a former
senator who went up against Mondale in a bid for the Democratic
presidential nomination, placed a surprising second in Iowa and won New
Hampshire. "Things then moved fast. Some polls moved 50 points in seven
days," Devine says. (Mondale, though, did end up squelching the Hart
insurgency by exploiting the Democratic establishment in key states.)
If Sanders does score well in the early states, Devine insists, his
campaign will have a delegate-accumulation strategy reminiscent of the
one Barack Obama's 2008 campaign employed to focus as much on snagging
delegates as winning caucuses and primaries. "Even if Clinton beats us
in some states by 20 points, we can split the delegates with smart
focusing," Devine says. And then Sanders will be in a position to make
the case to the Democratic establishment that he can assemble an
electorate in the general election that is favorable to Democrats (as
Obama did in 2008). "We don't know yet what it will look like," Devine
remarks. "We haven't done the strategic modeling yet. I've been trying
to persuade Bernie we should do that." Instead, he says, Sanders at this
point would rather concentrate on promoting his message: Inequality is
killing the middle class, climate change must be addressed, big-money
politics must be reformed, and new progressive policy ideas, such as
free college tuition and expanded Social Security benefits, must be
advanced. (Devine also gave Sanders a PowerPoint presentation on how the
campaign can use Big Data methods: "He was impressed, but we're not
sure we can scale up to that. We won't have $1 billion.")
And what about Clinton? How will Sanders take her on?
Sanders recently
boasted
that he has "never run a negative ad," noting that he "hates and
detests these 30-second negative ads." Devine says this is part of
Sanders' DNA. "You need to know Bernie's history with negative ads to
get this," Devine says. In 1988, when Sanders was the mayor of
Burlington, Vermont, he ran for an open congressional seat as an
independent and lost a close race to Republican Peter Smith. Two years
later, Sanders was back to challenge Smith. In that 1990 race, Smith
aired tough ads assailing Sanders, and Sanders' aides advised him to hit
back. Instead, Sanders bought airtime for a five-minute spot in which
he talked straight to the camera and decried the attack ads. (It didn't
hurt Sanders that the National Rifle Association was slamming Smith for
having voted for a ban on semi-automatic weapons.) Sanders ended up
winning that race by 16 points. "This was his formative experience,"
says Devine. "Negative ads have to be denounced and jiu-jitsued."
"We have to present the differences in the
ads without him coming across as part of the political system," says Tad
Devine, Sanders' longtime strategist and ad man.
During his 1994 re-election race, Sanders had a close call. He won by
only three points. He responded by doing what he swore he would never
do: He hired a Washington consultant, Devine. But he told Devine he
would stick to his no-negative-ads stance. In the next election, Sanders
aired only positive spots and won by 22 points.
Ten years later, Sanders ran for the Senate, with Devine still
advising him. His Republican opponent was a millionaire businessman
named Rich Tarrant who dumped about $7 million into the race in a state
where, Devine says, no candidate had ever spent more than $2 million on a
campaign. "It was a vicious campaign against Bernie," Devine recalls.
"He
ran ads that accused
Bernie of supporting child molesters and terrorists. Chuck Schumer and
Harry Reid were telling Bernie, 'You must respond.'" Sanders replied
with an ad Devine had cut, in which Sanders noted he was being unfairly
attacked and asked voters to visit his website to get the truth.
Subsequent commercials by Sanders attempted to refute the stream of
attack ads from Tarrant. The Sanders campaign also pushed
an ad in which country singer Willie Nelson endorsed Sanders and cited his work for family farmers. Sanders beat Tarrant by more than a 2-1 margin.
So Sanders has survived and thrived in politics by neutralizing
negative ads and resisting the urge to attack. And part of his shtick is
that he doesn't do conventional politics. So, Devine notes, he will not
directly criticize or poke at Clinton. For sure, no personal attacks or
cheap shots. "That won't help him," Devine says. "He rejects the status
quo of politics." Sanders won't even do a straight-up contrast ad—as
in, Bernie Sanders believes X about subject Y, but Hillary Clinton
believes Z. "If we do that, we're done," Devine says. "If we do a
classic comparative ad, it's over. We'll have to be smarter."
And Team Sanders does have what it considers to be a smarter way:
implying a contrast. In previous campaigns, Devine says, "We have
constantly embedded contrast in everything we do." One example: During
the 2006 Senate race, Tarrant's residence became a political issue
because he had claimed a Florida mansion as his home for tax purposes.
Sanders ran a biographical ad in which he declared he worked in
Washington and lived in Burlington—an indirect jab at Tarrant. In the
campaign against Clinton, Devine notes, "There will be a lot of implicit
negative. But it won't look negative. It won't feel negative."
That's how Sanders recently handled the
Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact.
He opposes the measure as a sop to corporate America and billionaires.
Asked about Clinton's view—she has referred positively to this trade
deal in the past but more recently has avoided stating a firm
position—Sanders didn't proclaim that she's in bed with the 1 percent;
he
called on her
to take a clear stance. "It's not a question of watching this," he
said. "You're going to have determine which side are you on." Devine
points out that "this is not negative, but contrasting. When you offer
voters a contrast on the issues, they don't take that as a negative." He
adds that Sanders is "very good at this."
Contrast without attacking—that's the mantra. "As someone making the
ads, it will be a difficult challenge," Devine says. "We have to present
the differences in the ads without him coming across as part of the
political system." Devine fears that if Sanders crosses that line, the
Clinton campaign will fire back hard: "They have all the tonnage. We're
dead."